Friday, September 21, 2007

On Putting Books Down

Wednesday night, on the way home from the KGB reading, I had to put down the book I was reading; I didn't pick it up again yesterday, but I hope to get back to it this weekend.

Some books you put down because they're annoyingly wrong, or just annoying -- but this one I had to put it down because it was too true.

Now, I'm a man, so I'm familiar with male violence. I don't like it, and I think my temper is much better than it used to be, but I know a bit about violence, and the sources of violence. What I don't know, at least not firsthand, is that horrible fascination some women have for dangerously violent men.

I recognize that it's real -- it's been canonized in the romance field as the "bad boy" subgenre, where of course the violent men are tamed by the true love of a heroine -- but when I'm reading a book with a first-person narrator who goes weak in the knees (and other places) over a man who has just explicitly threatened her with death, I need to stop for a while.

Not because it's not exactly right; not because I don't believe completely in her reaction. But because I do, and because I wish the human race wasn't like that...either of them.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I get a lot of comments on a song I wrote called Pomegranate that compares going between the space station and Earth with going between aboveground and belowground.

"Like Persephone, I stand at the edge of the void, torn between the earth and the sky"

In general, guys say Persephone was dragged off by Hades, and women agree with me that Persephone might have stood on the trail picking her dress up to show her ankle.

Post a Comment